Learning Culture at Google

¶ … Google is a Learning Organization Worth more than General Motors, Disney and McDonald's combined, Google is a leading provider of information services today. This company achieved its meteoric growth in large part due to its ability to respond to changes in the marketplace and provide innovative solutions to consumer and business information needs (Morrison, 2003). Innovation, though, requires creativity and experimentation, but Google has learned how to accomplish this effectively by encouraging a reinforcing loop process throughout its organization (Sungkhawan, 2011).

In fact, engineers and managers at Google are allowed 20% of their work time to devote to their own personal projects and tacit knowledge is shared in a reinforcing feedback fashion (Tidd & Bessant, 2013). For example, Tidd and Bessant report that, "Technical employees are expected to spend 20% of their time on projects other than their core job, and similarly managers are required to spend 20% of their time on projects outside the core business, and 10% to completely new products and businesses" (2013, p. 138).

Clearly, most organizations do not enjoy the vast resources available to Google, but they can still achieve comparable results by fine-tuning their learning processes in ways that identify needs and corresponding solutions. In this regard, Sungkhawan advises that, "In other words, innovation requires a culture of experimenting with new ways of satisfying peoples' needs and wants through a cost-effective manner" (2011, p. 127).

This means that Google learned early on that innovation does not just fall out of the sky but is rather the result of implementing and sustaining a corporate culture that places a high value on individual initiative. Moreover, at Google, balancing feedback is used to translate innovation into practical products and services that can generate additional revenues for the company.

For instance, Sungkhawan notes that, "Innovation requires a mindset for effectiveness (doing the right things), efficiency (doing things right), as well as the ability to proactively anticipate customers' needs and wants, and convert this knowledge into useful products and services in a timely manner" (2011, p. 128). Likewise, Tidd and Bessant (2013) report that at Google, there are formal balancing feedback loops in place to help identify potential commercially viable ideas and to translate these into money-makers for the company.

In this regard, Tidd and Bessant note that at Google, "Ideas progress through a formal qualification process which includes prototyping, pilots and tests with actual users. The assessment of new ideas and projects is highly data-driven and aggressively empirical, reflecting the IT basis of the firm" (2013, p. 138). According to Signorelli and Reed (2011), Google has modeled the way for other organizations seeking to become learning organizations because they have done everything right from the outset by emphasizing the need for innovation and creativity in ways that can make money.

In this regard, Signorelli and Reed report that, "The successful [organizations] always seem to create diversity of opportunities -- to offer different types of learning experiences as well as avenues to create connections between one another" (2011, p. 56). These outcomes are highly congruent with the definition of learning organization provided by Senge (1994) who advises, "Learning organizations [are] organizations where people continually expand their capacity.